Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to cloud computing systems and, more specifically, to distributing tasks to workers in a crowd-sourcing workforce.
Description of Related Art
Networked computing environments have enabled the ability to outsource certain tasks or services to large groups of workers via an online community. Tasks and services may be outsourced to such an online community instead of or in addition to assigning these tasks or services to employees or contractors. This outsourcing approach is known as crowdsourcing, and is distinguished from traditional outsourcing in that the work is performed by a largely undefined crowd of workers (referred to herein as “crowd workers”) rather than through one or more well-defined external workforce suppliers.
Through crowdsourcing, a large set of tasks may be performed by a large group of self-identified workers, such as workers managed by one or more outside agencies, at a reduced cost and greater efficiency than traditional outsourcing approaches. Each task may be divided into smaller subtasks. Each crowd worker is then assigned to complete a task or, if a task is divided into subtasks, one or more of the subtasks, after which the crowd worker completes the assigned work, where the assigned work includes tasks and/or subtasks. Over time, all the work is performed by the group of crowd workers, resulting in the completion of all the tasks. The process is iterative, where new tasks are continuously added and assigned to crowd workers, and the crowd workers continuously complete the previously assigned tasks and subtasks.
One drawback of the above approach is that tasks are typically assigned without regard to skill or experience of the individual crowd worker. Each crowd worker that logs into the crowdsourcing application is assigned the next task in the task queue, even if the crowd worker has a relatively low skill level to perform the particular task.
In one example, the tasks in the task queue could be to perform a quality control check on a portion of media content, such as a five minute video or audio segment of a movie, or subtitles and closed captioning text for the movie. Some crowd workers may be more adept at checking video or audio quality, while other crowd workers may be more skilled in checking subtitles or closed captioning. In addition, some crowd workers may complete tasks more correctly or efficiently than other workers. However, a given task is assigned to the next crowd worker who is available to complete the task, even if there is another available crowd worker who has greater skill or efficiency to complete the task. As a result, tasks completed via crowdsourcing may suffer in terms of reduced efficiency or quality relative to more traditional work assignment approaches.
As the foregoing illustrates, what is needed is a more effective way to assign tasks to crowd workers when crowdsourcing work.